Stateless Democracy

were the first “colonized class” in history and concluding
that a truly free society by definition has to include the
liberation of women. Women also played an important
role during the foundational years of the PKK, such as cofounder
Sakine Cansız, who explained their struggle as one
“against denial, social chauvinistic impression, primitive
and nationalist approaches.”
During the early nineties, the PKK reached its military
peak in a bloody war against Turkey, gaining control over
substantial parts of the mainly Kurdish inhabited areas
of the southeastern part of the country. This period saw
a sharp increase in the visibility and importance of women
within the movement as they progressively participated
both as guerillas and in administrative and political positions.
At the same time of the growth of the PKK, the role
of women also became challanged, as male fighters did not
always accept them as equals. Thus, with explicit support
from Öcalan, the women’s movement started to organize
itself autonomously, fighting patriarchal tendencies both
outside and within the party. This led to, among other developments,
the creation of the first autonomous women’s
guerilla units in 1993, several political and social women’s
organizations, and the first women’s political party in
1999. It was during these years of military conflict that the
women’s struggle formulated a specific women’s liberation
ideology. Inspired by the writings of Öcalan, the women’s
movement constructed an idea and model for a society
based on a different concept of power. It was this ideology
that opened up the space for the movement’s later shift,
which abandoned the claim for an independent Kurdish
state in favor of a new model of democracy.
When in 1999 Öcalan was captured and placed in isolated
imprisonment by the Turkish state, the PKK entered
into a crisis. Due to the severe retaliation of the Turkish
army, the claim for an independent state seemed more
improbable than ever. While in prison, Öcalan published
new writings in which he took the critique of patriarchy
set forth by the women’s movement to its full consequence.
The concept of the nation-state, he claims, is an extension
of patriarchy. The enslavement of women by men in
the microstructure of the family — “man’s small state,” as
Öcalan calls it — is replicated in the larger construct of the
nation-state, whose myths of cultural unity and territorial
belonging blind its subjects to the larger global capitalist
condition in which the state is implicated. Öcalan terms
the nation-state a “colony of capital,” and in line with the
women’s movement, decides to reject the idea of an independent
state altogether. In its place, he proposes the model
of “democratic confederalism,” a model derived from the
American ecologist and anarchist Murray Bookchin, whose
works Öcalan studied during his time in prison. The Kurds,
Öcalan claims, should demand democratic autonomy without
the state, and unite instead on the basis of principles
of decentralized self-government by councils and cooperatives,
principles of gender equality and communalism
(communism without the state), and confederalist models
of co-existence and cooperation. This would create the
space for a new “social ecology” that would render society
resilient against its internal enemy — patriarchy, and its
external enemy — the forces of global capitalism.
It is this particular model that is currently being implemented
in Rojava. As in 2012, when the so-called Arab
Spring swept through the Middle East, causing a civil war
to ignite in Syria, the Kurds living in the PKK-influenced
northern part of the country took their chance to declare autonomy
over their regions while Assad was fighting rebels
in the south. In the three cantons of Rojava — Cizîre, Afrîn,
and Kobanê — covering a territory about two-thirds the size
of Belgium, with a population of approximately 4.6 million
people, the Kurdish revolutionary government declared that
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